Liars And Wives in the “Drag Show of Nuclear Familyhood:” an interview with Sarah Manguso

Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, is her ninth book and was released in the summer of 2024. Placed in the long context of women’s literary protests against the abusive nature of marriage, Manguso’s will be distinguished for its accumulation of powerful and telling details that deeply plumb the coercive and pervasive nature of abusive marriage. Liars sits now alongside an impressive and diverse shelf of Manguso’s previous work, including a novel, Very Cold People, which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. She has published one story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. Her work appears in publications including Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and many others. She has been honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her writing has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She grew up in Massachusetts, teaches at Antioch University in Los Angeles, and gives manuscript consultations through the Shipman Agency.

Scott LaMascus: Liars begins with utter frankness and perspective about a marriage gone wrong and the narrator’s statement that “my life became archetypal.” Could you excuse a reader for thinking that it is astonishing then, that this narrator is such a master of granular observation?

Sarah Manguso: Thank you for the compliment. I needed to tell the story of this marriage—to show what covert abuse really looks like—in painstaking detail. People love to say that Marriage takes work. All over the world, domestic abuse victims are thinking, Wow, I guess this is the work that everyone’s talking about. When we don’t talk about what constitutes reasonable relationship work, on a granular level, we enable abuse. That’s why it was so important for me to pack this book with details. Because it’s the critical mass of details that makes John’s abuse impossible to deny.

When I was primarily a nonfiction writer, I was often asked whether what I wrote in my books was actually fictional, and now that I’m primarily a fiction writer I’m frequently asked whether my novels are really just true stories.

SL: Book tour interviews are interesting and seem filled with tropes. Let’s flip the script a little, if possible. What question would you most like to be asked about this new novel? Or perhaps you’d discuss a question that you do not like being asked?

SM: When I was primarily a nonfiction writer, I was often asked whether what I wrote in my books was actually fictional, and now that I’m primarily a fiction writer I’m frequently asked whether my novels are really just true stories. That said, I welcome questions and try to respond usefully to all of them.

SL: I read Liars in a single sitting, straight through, and found it a deeply affecting experience. I also could not help thinking of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s critique for marriage and gendered power. I hope you’ll forgive me if that’s a sophomoric connection, but you are in great company with Gilman by naming the antagonist and husband of your narratives “John.” Both narratives leave the child nameless. I’ll avoid spoilers by not detailing a few other points of connection between the two stories, but I found these echoes to be powerful. Maybe these points of connection are more about gender, power, and marriage than literary influence. What effects did you intend by these choices in your fictional characters and story?

SM: I love “The Yellow Wallpaper” and am honored by the comparison. I felt that it was unnecessary to name the child, so I didn’t name him. I’ve always been interested in brevity, velocity, and compression, so this decision felt aesthetically coherent with the rest of the book and with my writing in general. I didn’t remember that Gilman didn’t name the child in her story, either, or that the husband character was also named John.

SL: What literary works, if any, influenced you in creating this novel?

SM: Some of the works that inspired me and which tread the same ground as Liars are Kate Zambreno’s book Heroines, Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Bruxelles, and Eléonore Pourriat’s film Majorité Oprimée. But I always get nervous when I’m asked about my influences because writing is such a mysterious, intuitive process, guided by an unknown number of forces inside and outside of my awareness.

SL: Jhumpa Lahiri has observed that your novel, Very Cold People, was “redefining genre.” How do you think of Liars as a contribution to a genre?

SM: I don’t pay much attention to the apparent divisions between genres, which are always changing, but I’m grateful to critics and readers who do that work after the fact.

SL: Thoughtful readers will keep a clear separation between fictional characters and biographical ones, but your acknowledgments express gratitude to Chump Nation, an infidelity-support network. And your narrator calls herself a “chump.” Could you speak a moment to how writer’s lives inform fiction?

SM: I wrote Liars in less than two years during a high-conflict COVID divorce and being the primary parent to my young child. In the book group materials for Liars, I name Tracy Schorn’s brilliant book Leave a Cheater, Gain a Life in the list of books and films that inspired me, and Tracy generously hosted me on her podcast. But I don’t go into the details of my own marriage and divorce in the press because I don’t want my son to be burdened with more of the story than he already knows.

SL: This novel speaks to the most volatile subjects recognized by all who have tried marriage, including sex, money, and in-laws. These seem so crisply and smartly observed. Liars also observes the cultural and legal context of marital conflict and divorce, including creative and professional envy, financial management impact, and power imbalances. Could you expand a moment on any of those you’d like to discuss? Does this story leave any room for a marriage that is not toxic to women? Could you please discuss your views of intimate relationships and the pursuit of creative excellence?

I believe that traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm and that marriages skew toward tradition unless you and your spouse are doing a superhuman amount of work to correct for the misogyny that’s baked into every social system in our culture. Liars is my ninth book, but it’s the first one I’ve ever written as a single woman. I can’t imagine ever giving up this freedom.

SM: I believe that traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm and that marriages skew toward tradition unless you and your spouse are doing a superhuman amount of work to correct for the misogyny that’s baked into every social system in our culture. Liars is my ninth book, but it’s the first one I’ve ever written as a single woman. I can’t imagine ever giving up this freedom.

SL: Your narrator speaks about “invisible labor,” which partners ought to talk about now more than in the past. Why do your characters, like their neighbors in the nonfictional world, find role-switching so difficult? Is this what the narrator means when she says her life has been lived in a “drag show of nuclear familyhood?”

SM: Traditional marriage was designed to exhaust wives. I wanted to expose all of that invisible, unnamed, undescribed labor, which traditional wives are too exhausted to make art about. Jane calls her marriage a drag show because she thinks she’s play-acting the part of John’s wife; she knows that she is a writer, maybe even a great writer, and that her role as a wife is incidental. But John has other ideas.

SL: Several times, your narrator specifically and succinctly connects her experiences to those of all women of all time. For example, after an incident of spousal abuse, the narrator expresses hope: “Maybe we can get through this without counseling, a wife said for the two-billionth time in human history” (95). Is this a grounds for solidarity among women in the novel? In life off the page?

SM: I don’t think Jane is abused much more than the average wife, but when I call it abuse, people sometimes recoil. They don’t want to know that they’ve been abused. I hope very much that my novel will encourage women to acknowledge their own covertly abusive marriages and to leave them before the Republicans succeed in taking away the right to no-fault divorce.

SL: Your poetry and nonfiction seem to share with this novel a love of compression. It is amazing how disciplined this novel is on the paragraph and sentence level. Could you discuss this as a matter of craft? How do you achieve this? Is this gift, process or technique, in terms of writing? What might be your suggestions for how your writing students can nurture concision?

SM: I think that if I have a gift, it is that I enjoy writing concisely. I know a woman who runs ultramarathons, who can run hundreds of miles through the desert without stopping. Does she achieve that because of a gift, or because of a certain process or technique, or because of discipline? No, she just enjoys running.

SL: The narrator of Liars records physical health and bodily details in frank and interesting ways. She juxtaposes details from her own, her husband’s, and the child’s health. Could you discuss physical and mental health in this novel?

SM: Jane’s apparent mental illness doesn’t come from out of nowhere. It is a result of John’s abuse. Jane’s fantasies about smearing shit on John’s paintings, her raging and yelling and sobbing—she knows it doesn’t look good, but she can’t hide it. The divorce mediator scolds her for it, but not even the mediator seems to understand that this apparently crazy woman is simply reacting to being abused. It was also crucial to me to represent the way that trauma impedes a person’s ability to remember things. Jane has to keep repeating the same story until she can safely hold onto it. She can’t integrate the details until the trauma has passed.

I frequently find myself telling writers to stop doing their homework—to write only what they truly want to write, and if they don’t know what that is, to figure it out. We don’t get to choose our preoccupations, but we do have to discern them.

SL: In your interview with Wildness, you mentioned that you don’t think of multiple drafts as terribly helpful until the final editing stages of a project. What craft suggestions do you find yourself giving writers when they submit their work to you for review and development?

SM: I frequently find myself telling writers to stop doing their homework—to write only what they truly want to write, and if they don’t know what that is, to figure it out. We don’t get to choose our preoccupations, but we do have to discern them.

SL: You’ve found success across genres. What advice would you give writers thinking about jumping to a second or third genre?

SM: I don’t really think about genre as such until it’s time to slap a marketing category on a book. I think that good writing is good writing; there are short forms and long forms, verse and prose… When I was in graduate school, studying poetry, I was frightened when I realized I didn’t know how to write verse anymore and didn’t really want to. So I started writing prose, and literally nothing in the world changed. I would advise writers to write exactly what they want and try not to think about genre if it doesn’t feel fruitful.

SL: Any hints of what you’re working on or interested in for your next projects?

SM: My next book is an erotic novel about aging, obsession, and freedom.

SL: Who are you reading now?

SM: I just finished Claire Kilroy’s astonishing novel Soldier Sailor. Next up is the anthropologist Wednesday Martin’s book Untrue.